'Breaking Bad' season 5 mid-season premiere: 'Blood Money' recap

While Breaking Bad has done nothing but gather critical and cultural steam over the past year, the first eight episodes of its final season weren't universally adored. While even the least well-received episode of this show is still more acclaimed than 99% of the rest of television, some took issue with the deliberate pace of storytelling in 'season 5a' and the time spent on introducing new characters like Jesse Plemons's Todd (who's notably absent here).

Writer Peter Gould knows exactly what our expectations are for this episode, following Hank's light bulb moment in the bathroom, and takes great pleasure in flipping them on their head. Surely, we're thinking, there'll be several episodes of slow-burn tension before the big Walt-Hank confrontation, with Hank lying low, building up a case, waiting to strike until the opportune moment. In short, we're expecting a slow zoom, and instead what the final moments of 'Blood Money' gives us is a smash cut.

Gould even has Walt play out the slow-burn scenario for a while. Having found Hank's GPS tracker on his car, he goes over to the Schrader house to confront him but seems to bottle it, reverting to the usual jovial-small-talk mode. He turns to leave. Reconsiders, as 17 different emotions play over Cranston's face in a heartbeat. And then he turns around, and it's on.

Good God, we've missed this show.

"It was you. All along, it was you," is such a significant moment of pay-off, and it's executed breathlessly well here with Hank delivering a well-deserved beatdown before reeling off an abridged laundry list of Walt's crimes. The most satisfying moment is when he mentions the lie about Marie's hospitalization, realizing that he literally beat up Jesse for nothing back in season three. We're putting out a prediction right now that Hank and Jesse's dynamic is going interesting places this season.

And while it's not clear exactly what Walt meant by his thinly veiled threat to Hank, Hank is now at the point Skyler was at this time last season: terrified of Walt and powerless to do much about it. All the evidence he has against Walt is circumstantial, and since he's already been warned off the Fring case he could presumably lose his job if he brings any of this to the DEA without rock-hard proof.

When Skyler was considering turning him in, Walt told her that she, like Jesse before her, would come around to his way of thinking. And he was absolutely right. Will Hank follow suit? It can only be a matter of time before he and Skyler have their own mano-a-mano moment, but despite her knack for emotional manipulation it's hard to imagine Hank being talked around. His enlisting Jesse, on the other hand, feels a lot more plausible.

Poor, poor Jesse. As Saul points out, getting rid of his blood money isn't going to save his soul, but it's a start, and it's so in-character that he would try to give his money to the parents of a lost child and to Mike's now-effectively-orphaned granddaughter. His futile money-throwing rampage was a really sad moment; he's clearly desperate to do something significant - to break good, if you will - but he's hemmed in by Walt. It's no coincidence that Walt brings the money back to Jesse (like a bad penny) just as Jesse is watching a cockroach crawl across his table; roaches are notorious for their ability to survive just about anything.

But Walt's time is finally running out. Assuming he was telling Hank the truth, his cancer is back and he'll be dead within a year - although we know that the flash-forward takes place on his 52nd birthday, which is at least half a year away within the show's timeline. And within that time, something terrible is going to befall the White family. Their house isn't just empty in the future; it looks as though it's been condemned.

That was a terrifying, almost post-apocalyptic sequence to begin the episode on - set to Dave Porter's troubling ambient score - because the White house has been such a comforting core setting amidst the show's chaos. But once he started cooking up meth in other people's homes and storing poison in his bedroom, it was only a matter of time before Walt's own house would become a ruin. And now, wherever he's going in this terrible future, he's going armed with both a machine gun and a cylinder of ricin.

Walt and Jesse's conversation, with Walt yet again trying to play the twisted fatherly role and Jesse almost too horrified to form sentences, played like a dark variation on several scenes they've shared before. It's almost the "blowfish" scene from season two, only about seven shades grimmer. There was a time when Jesse would have been totally swayed by Walt calling him "son" and telling him everything would be fine, but now he just looks haunted even as he seemingly goes along with the lie.

One more lie. To take stock for a second: there's no way that the truth about Jane will ever come out unless Walt confesses. A couple more people know about Brock's poisoning, most notably Saul, but that's still a secret that could easily go unrevealed. But "Mike's alive" just might end up being the lie that finally undoes Walt.

Other thoughts:- Skyler got her very own "Stay out of my territory" moment at the carwash. It wasn't clear whether she might have suspected that something sexual had gone on between Walt and Lydia, or whether she was being protective purely on a business level. Either way, very nice, very Carmela Soprano. - Walt continues to exhibit traits of the people he's killed - folding that towel neatly on the floor before kneeling to vomit was straight out of the Gus Fring bag of fastidious badass tricks. - Not that we have anything against the proposed Saul Goodman spin-off, but we'd be a whole lot more excited about a Badger and Skinny Pete spin-off in which they do nothing but pitch Star Trek spec scripts while stoned. Other sci-fi franchises could be incorporated too. - This was the second episode of the show directed by Bryan Cranston, and while it had fewer visual flourishes than the season 3 premiere 'No Mas', there was some incredible, disorienting work done with sound and angles in the early Hank scenes. Extra anvil points for Marie jokingly telling Walt: "You are the devil," just as Hank emerges onto the patio. - The award for short-sighted lunacy once again goes to Walt. Does he really think that ignoring Lydia is going to make the problem go away? Declan knows who he and Jesse are, and a drop in quality to 68% purity is not exactly insignificant. This might end up being how Jesse is pulled back in - Lydia should probably have figured that begging for mercy wasn't going to sway Walt, but Jesse's a lot more susceptible to guilt. - Walt's wardrobe was aggressively, notably beige in the carwash scene, and Skyler's was right there with him. Color is hugely significant on Breaking Bad, and this feels like both of them making a concerted effort to wear the trappings of an unremarkable, multiple carwash-owning couple "living ordinary, decent lives". - The make-up job on Aaron Paul was subtle but superb in this episode; in that scene with Walt he looked like he'd aged at least ten years since last season. - "Yes, okay, alright. I said that. I did. But it was in the heat of the moment. I was trying to win an argument." This non-apology could literally be applied to so many of the terrible things Walt has said and done, primarily to Jesse, throughout the show. - Let's start the theorising on that flash-forward right now. The Whites' house looks condemned. All their belongings are gone, and it's very plainly not going to be for sale any time soon. Are the Whites in witness protection? Have they 'disappeared' with the help of Saul's associate? Or are they all dead?